Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

Here are a couple of our favorite episodes of Margaret Killjoy's Cool Poeple Who Did Cool Stuff podcast series. All the People Who Tried to Kill Mussolini, Parts 1 & 2 Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/id1620562792 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0Qptn7pM3Pzi01rKVBvjG4 iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-cool-people-who-did-cool-96003360/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:12Robert Evans?

  Picture this: You're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for methods of historical proportions.

• 1:56Robert Evans?

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• 2:20Robert Evans?

  Hey everybody, Robert here. It is the end of the year, you're cooling down from a Christmas, you know, still probably finishing up pie and other goodies that you got. I hope you had a good one. We're all bracing for the new year to come. Behind the Bastards is of course, continuing to publish as we normally do around this time of year, but we've also got some specials for you from elsewhere in our network. And today, we have collected two great episodes from cool people who did cool stuff about all of the people who tried to kill Benito Mussolini. This is with the great Margaret Killjoy. I think it is very fitting for the end of this year.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, you know what's missing? Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch. And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just five bucks. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokemon, with new limited edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home, or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value. And the cash goes

• 3:44Speaker 01

  right in your account. No listing it online, no stranger lowballing you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 4:08Robert Evans?

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• 5:07Robert Evans?

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• 5:52Robert Evans?

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• 6:17Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Cool People Do Cool Stuff. We're back. In case you noticed, we weren't here, but now we're here. The "we" in this case is me, Margaret Killjoy, and my producer, Sophie. Hi, Sophie.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  Hi, Magpie.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  And my guest, Robert Evans.

• 6:36Robert Evans?

  Hi, Magpie. I listened to, when I was buying hay today, right before this, I went to go get hay for my livestock at the feed store, and they were playing that song, "Brandy." And so now I am in my head remixing that song, instead of being about a woman whose lover dies at sea, to be about you making podcasts.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Excellent. Well, we can make hay from that. One time, Robert and I went and got hay, and it was the first time in a little while that my pickup truck got to be a pickup truck beside, well, I guess it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camper full of hay is what happened.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  And it took me a long time to get all the hay out.

• 7:16Robert Evans?

  It does take a long time to get all the hay out.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  But it was worth it, because then the goats got to eat hay.

• 7:22Robert Evans?

  And the goats love hay.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  So, this week-

• 7:25Speaker 05

  Speaking of saying "hay."

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Oh, we should say "hay" to Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi, Rory.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Hi, Rory.

• 7:31Robert Evans?

  Hi, Rory.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And, for no particular reason-

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Not at all.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  I actually genuinely picked the subject and started researching it before the activities that happened last week.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  You did. Like, I can vouch for you, you 100% did.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  I'm glad you-

• 7:50Speaker 05

  You did.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Hopefully you don't have to vouch for me in court about it.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  I'm just, but I would, and it would be, I would be truthful. I have, like, documentation. Fully.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  It's true. Because the thing we're gonna talk about, Robert Evans, have you ever heard of, um, people trying to assassinate people that they don't like?

• 8:07Robert Evans?

  No, assassinations. No one would ever do such a thing. No one would ever do such a thing and then have it immediately cause Blue Cross Blue Shield to reverse a policy on denying claims arbitrarily when the surgery takes too long to pay for anesthetic. That would never happen.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  No, there's not a whole saying about direct action gets the goods. You all are listening to this in the future where the knock on effects will have become more clear. But right now, we know very, we only know one knock on effect of last week's.

• 8:35Robert Evans?

  Which is if you've got blue cross, you now have to be less worried about getting surgery.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which is basically everyone's nightmare.

• 8:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Literally, that is so, like, so many people have that fear and that.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  It's ghoulish. Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  It's so ghoulish. It's so gross.

• 8:51Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  Well, the person that we're going to talk about attempting to assassinate in the past, who's already dead, is a little fascist you might have heard of named Mussolini.

• 9:03Robert Evans?

  Mussolini? I hardly know.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Leeny?

• 9:06Robert Evans?

  Okay, pass. It's not gonna work. Sorry.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Mussolini, originally, this was going to be a two-parter where one part was the people who tried when Mussolini was coming up, and then the second part was going to be people who succeeded when he was coming down. But it's actually all going to be about people who tried when he was coming up because there were so many. Did you know that an awful lot of people tried to kill Mussolini?

• 9:32Robert Evans?

  Yes. Um, I mean, it's like with Hitler, right? Like, you've got that guy who tried to blow him up and that, uh, and almost did, that fucking carpenter who tried to blow him up in one of the halls he was speaking at, all sorts of pre-attempts. So I wasn't really familiar with the ones on Mussolini, but I was sure there had been some.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  We're gonna talk about, I think, eight of them today, or this week.

• 9:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds like the right amount.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, uh, so far by my count, I was counting right before I recorded, I was talking to one of my friends about it, so far by my count, we've got one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican, and five anarchists attempted to kill Mussolini. So Benito Mussolini is famously one of the founders of fascism, the ideology that is genuinely and truly bad, that 95% of the people on this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about what counts as fascism.

• 10:28Robert Evans?

  Yes, that, that's, that's part of the problem.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  It doesn't help that, I mean, because some people use fascism to just being anyone I don't like, or any authoritarianism, right? And that's not an accurate way to talk about things. We shouldn't call our enemies fascists when they're not fascists.

• 10:48Robert Evans?

  No, like Stalin, Stalin wasn't really a fascist. No, because in part fascists come to power through popular acclaim as a result of like, setting themselves up in opposition to the left. There's this also idea that Stalin does kind of fit in with the attitude that like, the fascist dictator embodies the people in some way. Although the way in which like Soviet propaganda talked about Stalin was actually quite different from the way fascist propaganda tends to talk about the leader being like a, an embodiment of the people. But yeah, there are some similarities, like there's, there's a bunch of stuff. Syncretism is a big part. Go read your Umberto Eco.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Well, there's gonna be a bunch of Umberto's in this episode, but not Echo.

• 11:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  But it turns out Umberto is sort of the Mike of Italy. Well, the, yeah, Mccale is probably the Mike of Italy. But fascism is one of the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to ever come about, which is one of the reasons why you can kind of point to anything and call it fascism and be wrong, but also be like, you see where you're coming from about it? You know, because it's not actually a simple ideology. The more as I was reading this, because Italian fascism in particular, comes out of where the right and the left meet. And it is not a, well, we'll talk about this. I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds of defining fascism today, but I want to

• 12:13Speaker 04

  talk first about someone who 100% absolutely, I am certain, would have been fine with assassinating someone like Benito Mussolini about 15 years before Benito Mussolini came to power. That man, who would have been totally fine with killing Benito Mussolini, was Benito Mussolini.

• 12:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, well, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. To open up a can of worms that the internet is not equipped to handle, Benito Mussolini, the founder of the world's deadliest far-right ideology, started on the left.

• 12:49Robert Evans?

  Yep, he sure did. Kind of adjacent to anarchism.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. There's gonna be a lot of-

• 12:55Robert Evans?

  Also started as a journalist.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Hooray. Yeah, yeah. He was a socialist for a long-ass time. He was at least a second-generation leftist. Mussolini was born in the year 1883, and he was the child of a blacksmith socialist and a Catholic schoolteacher. He got named after a series of socialists and leftists because of his father, and then he was baptized Catholic because of his mom. He's named Benito after Benito Juarez, the liberal president of Mexico. And his middle names, which I forgot to look up in Italian, are Andrea and Amalacare. And these are after two anarchists. Because his father was part of the Anarchist International, which was an anti-authoritarian socialist organization in the 1870s.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  I'm just going straight into the like, the, the, the... This is like when I have to talk about eugenics on this show. You know, whenever I have to talk about something that was like really common and easily understood in the 19th century that makes no sense in the 21st century.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Italian nationalism is really intertwined with the left, and it's really intertwined with anarchism.

• 14:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that, I mean, it, it makes sense when you're coming out of a world, well, like, not, not very long before this period, Italy had been fucking Habsburg property. Much of Italy, at least, had been Habsburg property, right? Like, and when all of these things that we now just see is like, well, obviously Italy's a country, obviously Croatia's a country, when they're all the property of some guy and his inbred family, it's a lot less weird that it's a left-wing position to talk about nationalism.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists. He kind of wanted to at different points. When he was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp, but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with, I've read both, the anarchist orientalist poet named Lita Raffinelli. He translated two of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's books from French into Italian. And, because yeah, he was a journalist, he read newspapers and if you were a political person in the 19th century, if you were like a political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist. Your thing is that you read a newspaper.

• 15:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the same, it's the same reason as that with the generation coming up and the next generation are all going to get their starts on TikTok and Twitter and like, we're already seeing this on the right, right? I mean, and the left to a degree, you know, it's because that's, it's not, that's not the journalism tweeting is not, or making TikTok is not journalism, but journalism wasn't what we would consider journalism back then. It was just the best way of getting propaganda to the masses.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it was, yeah, you wrote polemics and propaganda just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea and you wanted to tell people about it, you would propagandize the idea. So Mussolini, the thing that's going to come up throughout this week's story is that he's clearly into authoritarianism, right? But there's something he liked about the anarchists. He liked their courage, he liked their commitment, and he liked action. You know, he was, he wasn't the kind of guy who wanted people to wait around and talk about things. He wanted people to go out and do things. He also, for a long time, shared their opinion that killing autocrats was just fine.

• 16:21Robert Evans?

  I mean, look, there's a Venn diagram, we may not like to say it, but like, there's a Venn diagram at points between me and Mussolini's life, right?

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, totally.

• 16:33Robert Evans?

  I'm not against killing early 20th century autocrats theoretically.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, totally. If we had a time machine, we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute monarchs from the 19th century and earlier.

• 16:46Robert Evans?

  Look, if I could go back in time and stab the King of Italy, I would try to.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  Well, that's going to bring us to this week's first assassin.

• 16:55Robert Evans?

  Is it the guy who stabbed the King of Italy?

• 16:58Speaker 04

  I actually can't remember whether this guy stabbed or shot him.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  This is the first, okay, this is the only successful assassin we're gonna talk about for a while. But he shaped a lot of Italy's politics for a long time. And that man's name was Gattano Bresci. He was a weaver from Italy who emigrated to the US in the 19th century to Patterson, New Jersey. And it's kind of funny because there's all of these different hidden, secret anarchist strongholds of the past. I don't normally think about New Jersey when I think about anarchism.

• 17:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Patterson, New Jersey, very strong Italian anarchist scene. The next little bit, because it's been a little while since I've looked up Gattano Bresci. I used to write about him a lot, so I'm kind of going into a little bit story mode when I talk about Gattano Bresci. I'm gonna have more direct sources for the rest of the people I'm gonna talk about, just so everyone knows. Gattano Bresci was hanging out in New Jersey with his Irish wife Sophie, which is a good name.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  I agree.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Right?

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  And his two daughters. And she's gonna, she's gonna be all right in this story.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Don't bring the name down.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, she's great. No, no negative notes on Sophie. In 1898, there are these food riots in Italy, and the government was like, well, a specific general was like, "Why don't we just murder the entire crowd that's rioting?" And so they, they did that. And we will think food riots, they usually think like, "Oh, everyone like lost their mind and was running around and burning things," or whatever. These were organized strikes that were met with lethal force. At least 80 protesters and two soldiers were killed.

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  Jesus.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  And so King Umberto I, what did he do? And everyone at the time was like, "Oh, the king is the true..." You know, a lot of like populism is based on the idea that the government's bad, but the king's good, you know?

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  And this translates to fascism too, right? During the Third Reich, there was always this idea that like, "If only Hitler knew," right? About like the worst Nazi policies. Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:56Robert Evans?

  This is the same thing with the czar. Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, we see this again and again. And so I think everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and be like, "Well, you probably shouldn't have done that," right? Oh, I did promise you more than one Umberto, and this is one of them. There's gonna be another one probably on Wednesday. But what Umberto I did is awarded the guy who ordered the massacre a Medal of Honor. And Gattano Bresci, he didn't like that.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  He was living in New Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with some folks and he'd put up a fuck ton of money to start that paper. It was like 200 bucks at the time, which is like several thousand dollars now. He didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for what he decided to do, so he didn't tell anyone. He didn't tell Sophie, he just told her he had to go deal with some stuff, like family stuff in Italy. He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper and said, "Hey, all that seed money I put in, I need it back now." And they were like, "Why?" And he was like, "Not your business, give me my money back." And so everyone kind of thought he was a sellout and he was just like getting his money to go fuck off, right? Everyone thought he left the movement. But he got his money back and he bought two things.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  He bought a Smith and Wesson and he bought a one-way ticket to Paris.

• 20:13Robert Evans?

  That's a song. That's a Warren Zevon song right there. "Smith and Wesson and a one-way ticket to Paris." Excellent.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  And "A King Is Gonna Die." And unlike a lot of would-be assassins that we've talked about on this show, Bresci practiced with the revolver, which is-

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  They're always key, yes.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. He made his way, uh, probably to Rome. He made his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out the area where he knew the king was gonna be. And then, on July 29th, 1900, he went out and he got some ice cream. I think he had lunch with like a stranger and just hanging out and he was like, "You're gonna remember me, guy." And then he waited for Umberto to come through, waiting in the crowd that was all there to cheer on their, you know, glorious leader. And, uh, he shot Umberto to death. The crowd immediately grabbed him. Gattano said, "I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the king. I have killed a principle."

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  Hell, oh, oh, that's, that's a good line.

• 21:16Robert Evans?

  That's a good line.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh, I guess we judged him wrong. And they started a fund to look after his kids and support his family. His wife came to Italy and testified to his good character in court. His whole family was arrested in an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go. And Italy, under a king, was actually had a more fair criminal justice system than the United States does today. They didn't have the death penalty. Mussolini is going to bring that back later. So he gets life in prison. He was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a day of exercises, like feet were manacled to the floor. They didn't treat him great. Less than a year

• 22:03Speaker 04

  later, he was found hanging in his cell, and modern historians are reasonably certain he was murdered at the time. Everyone's like, nah, he just killed himself. Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring in sweeping reactionary forces or anything. Usually people are like, ah, you killed the king and something worse is going to happen. This changed things, but it the existing kind of leftist government stayed in power and things kind of chugged along okay. It didn't even lead to they cracked down on the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it. It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement. When I first started dreaming up this show years ago, it was kind of in a different context, and I wanted to talk about anarchist

• 22:47Speaker 04

  history. And I was like, you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us. Why are all of our books boring? Has been my go to tagline. Because they did. International policing exists because of trying to stop the anarchist movement. Because

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  Nothing gets people to work together. Like when people go around and kill like poor people, everyone's like, oh, that sucks. Whatever. When people go around and kill kings, kings work together to make sure that that stops.

• 23:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, the kings are great at like, really, union behave. They really work like unions, royalty.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. When they're when someone comes for them as a class, they band together.

• 23:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  One person who defended Gattano Bresci, doing a little king murder, was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini. His fellow socialists were claiming Bresci was crazy for having killed the king, right? Mussolini said that tyrannicide was, quote, "the occupational hazard of being a king." Which, I don't know, I-

• 23:54Robert Evans?

  I mean,

• 23:57Robert Evans?

  talking about occupational hazards.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  I feel confident saying that being a king is a pre-existing condition, yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. But what isn't a pre-existing, no. But what else we're obliged to do is play ads for you now.

• 24:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Like these ones.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  And we're back. Now, this might shock you, Robert. Did you know Mussolini didn't stay leftist?

• 24:35Robert Evans?

  Really? Now, I thought you were talking about Benny Mussolini, the man who invented the three-day weekend.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Well, I was reading a whole bunch on that website X about how actually the fascists are socialists and leftists.

• 24:53Robert Evans?

  You're, of course, referring to the website that just plays a looping video of the song "X Gon' Give It To You." That's where I get all of my historical information about anarchists in the early 1900s as well.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yes, uh-huh.

• 25:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  My X feed is certainly playing looping videos of something right now.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  So Mussolini was kicked out of the Socialist Party because he supported interventionism. He supported Italy fighting in World War I. And along the way, he started developing his theories on fascism, which was basically, what if you took revolutionary socialism and then replaced it with revolutionary nationalism? Instead of class solidarity, you had national solidarity. What if you made all of the poor people suck up to the rich people and then defend the nation as a concept? The leftist trappings and some of the leftist strategies, but with right-wing goals. Because at the time, right-wing was just like the status quo, right? If you defend like the monarchy or whatever, you're right-wing.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  So there's nothing really revolutionary about it. But fascism was like, no, but we want the revolution and we want to like feel cool and edgy, but we also want to, we really like the taste of boots and so we're going to become fascists and invent this new ideology. For a few years, a lot of politics in Italy was happening in the streets, fascists versus anti-fascists fighting it out. And for a good several years, Mussolini tried to make common cause with the anarchists, specifically to join him against the socialists and the communists. After all, this is the period where the Bolsheviks in Russia were murdering anarchists en masse. And so, some folks, there was a chance that Mussolini was even going to go anarchist during this time. I actually don't buy it, but I read one person making this argument.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  He actually risked alienating his base with how much he appreciated the anarchists.

• 26:42Robert Evans?

  Interesting.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Because his base was like, no, those are the people we just go fight in the streets. But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right? And the anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, "We are always ready to admire men who are willing to die for a faith they believe in selflessly." And this is him contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists. The anarchists, in so many words, told him to eat shit and die. They refused his overtures again and again, and soon enough, they're going to try really, really hard to just outright kill this man. The most famous Italian anarchist, then and now, is this guy named Ercio Malatesta. He's popped into a bunch of our stories on this show, like when comrades got him to

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Argentina by smuggling him in a crate of sewing machines. And then he helped the bakers' union there become the most radical union in that country and the model that all the other unions rushed to follow, and how today in Argentina, there are still pastries named by the anarchist bakers, like Little Books and Little Bombs. I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail. He's an older fellow now. I think he's in his 60s at this point that we're talking about. And while he's in prison in Italy, there's a huge campaign to free him. And who supports that campaign but Benito Mussolini? Even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the streets during this time. Malatesta gets out, and he can't get any paper for his newspapers because of

• 28:09Speaker 04

  political pressure against him. And Mussolini offers him paper to print on. And Malatesta's like, "No! What? No!" So Mussolini keeps trying to be friends with him. But some anarchists and folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right? Because you can't have a new ideology without it starting with people who used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of anarchists turned fascist. Orwell has a really good essay about this. George Orwell has a really good essay about this called "Notes on Nationalism." It basically lays out the case that a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get people going from the radical left to the radical right reasonably often.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  And this unfortunately ties into the first time that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini. Some anarchists got together in 1921, before Mussolini ever even took formal power. He does that in 1922. And they're like, "All right, we gotta kill this guy." They delegated one among their number, a man named Biagio Massey, to go kill Mussolini. Instead, Biagio went to Mussolini and told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him. And then the very next day, because Mussolini is just being, I don't know, cunning or whatever.

• 29:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Mussolini goes and gives a speech about how the government needs to really release Malatesta, right? Even though he has just learned that the anarchists are trying to kill him. He's a 4D chess kind of man, this Mussolini.

• 29:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, he is. He was, I mean, one thing you learn about Mussolini and all these guys, with the exception of Franco, who unfortunately kept a pretty good grip on his rationality throughout his life, is most of them are a lot more cunning and better at planning before they get into power. And it's almost like power damages your brain in a way that makes you less capable of like clamping down on your own worst impulses and analyzing things logically.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  That makes sense to me. There's also this thing where people are always like Mussolini is like the little brother of Hitler, you know, and he's kind of a joke because Italy's military might is not the same as Germany's, right?

• 30:26Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  Mussolini pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible, evil, but like, he did become dictator of a major country. That is like a hard thing to do.

• 30:39Robert Evans?

  I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I know, but-

• 30:43Robert Evans?

  You give me six months, Margaret.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  Six months and a lot of pizza pies, if we know anything about our Italians.

• 30:54Robert Evans?

  Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut's probably fine.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  I really like the pizza in Italy.

• 30:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  I like how every country, not every country, but most countries I've been to, the American version of their national food is hard to get vegan, but in the country that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. Like, it's really easy to just go into any train station in Italy and buy vegan pizza.

• 31:15Robert Evans?

  You could feel about however you want, but undeniably, like, one of the most intense flexes in the history of international conflict is when the US had the former premier of the Soviet Union become a spokesman for Pizza Hut. Like, that was just such a, wow, well, I guess, I guess you guys lost that God bless, Jesus, Jesus.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  So Mussolini comes to power in October 1922, first as the prime minister. There's something that's like not not a coup. I mean, it's not a coup, but it's also not not a coup.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Thirty thousand of his black shirts, his personal army, marched on Rome in the March on Rome. The liberal government was like, hey, let's declare martial law to stop this, but then the king was like, no, let's just put that guy in charge instead.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He was not a fucking leftist at this point. Immediately helped out all the rich people, centralized power, and just was a right-wing shitbag. By 1924, he was like, "Look, there's not a democracy anymore, okay? It's just fascism." And Italy became fascist. And people didn't really like that. There are some occupational hazards to being a dictator. First and most famous at the time, but not the most famous now, was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And don't worry, if you're like, "Hey, that sounds like Zamboni," and you think that's clever, don't worry, there's two Zambonis later. Okay?

• 32:44Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  But this one's Zanaboni.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  This is not a serious country. Look, I know we're talking about serious things, but Italy, I just, I'm sorry. It's just not.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  One time I was in Italy, and my friend took me to, like, her very nice apartment in, um, I don't remember which city. I was on tour for like a month there, and I went to a bunch of cities. And she was like, looks out, and I'm like, "How do you afford this, like, amazing, fantastic place?" And she goes to the window and points down to this, like, public square right outside, and she's like, "That's where the mafia assassinates, like, executes people in public."

• 33:20Robert Evans?

  [laughing]

• 33:21Speaker 04

  "No one wants to live here."

• 33:24Robert Evans?

  I mean, shit, you could do that in front of my house if it, if I could have paid, like, you know, 30% less? Absolutely. Look, I'm not, I'm not getting involved with the mafia. They got no reason to be pissed at me.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:36Robert Evans?

  I don't see shit.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, she stays out of it.

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  I don't even hear gunshots at night. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:41Robert Evans?

  Mafia what?

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Most of the places that have been really nice, that, like, have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford to live in, have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah, that's true.

• 33:51Robert Evans?

  I, I mean, I have twice been coming home to my house when someone has, a couple of blocks away, been shooting it out with the police.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, a nice place to live.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  A nice place to live.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  And like, I'm not the police, so I'm not wearing a gunshot.

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  I'm not the police. These people have no reason to be angry at me.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  So, before we talk about Tito, we're gonna talk about another Italian socialist politician, Giacomo Mattiotti. Mattiotti.

• 34:20Robert Evans?

  And his best friend, Bucchidebeppo.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Giacomo Mattiotti was a socialist politician who tried repeatedly to expose Mussolini and fascism for what they were. After he published a book against the fascists and accused them of fraud, the fascists, who were certainly people of action, on June 10, 1924, Giacomo was kidnapped by the fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with a carpenter's file, I believe in the car. This was, in a lot of ways, the thing that paved the way for Mussolini to declare himself dictator. I'm gonna oversimplify this dangerously, but after a lot of hand wringing and investigations and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing, eventually Mussolini was like, "Look, I'm a fascist, though.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  I'm in charge, and we're gonna stab people to death with carpenter's files, and you're just gonna deal with it." This had an enormous amount of knock-on effects. One of them was that this other socialist politician, Tito Zanaboni, he got real mad. He had been part of the search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and the fascists, but after they killed his friend... Oh yeah, the socialists signed a peace treaty with the fascists.

• 35:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  I think that, after I talk about all the anarchists who became fascists and stuff, it's worth pointing out, the socialists signed a peace treaty with the fascists. After they killed his friend, he's like, "All right, fuck this. We gotta shoot this guy." And he and his friends conspired to kill Mussolini. Tito's a war hero, so he got a precision rifle, and he set himself up to station himself in a window to shoot Mussolini from far away. But among his co-conspirators was an informant. So Tito, and actually a general in the army, in the Italian army, were both sent to prison. I think they got the maximum sentence, which was 30 years at the time.

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  The United Socialist Party was no more. In court, Tito used the same defense as most of Mussolini's would-be assassins used later. Which is the defense of, "Yeah, but fuck Mussolini, though. Somebody should shoot him."

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Just, you know. Not always the best way to get off in court, but like, looks good in history books.

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, looks good. I mean, there's right around this time, the case of Sageman Talyrian, who a Berlin jury decided like, "Oh, no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated that guy who did a genocide."

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, totally.

• 36:48Robert Evans?

  That Turkish politician, yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian genocide episode, yeah.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a court in New York, start looking up jury nullifications right now.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  So, Tito is released in 1943, when the fascist government fell. Which is the other thing that comes up a lot, is that revolutionaries, or in this case, I mean, it wasn't even a revolutionary, it was a politician who was like, "Yeah, but other politicians shouldn't murder people." You know? And, um, people go to jail for a really long time. Right-wing governments often fall. And if you can stay alive in jail long enough, you'll be free again.

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  But, someone else was directly inspired by the death of Giacomo Mattiotti. One of my favorite strange and misunderstood assassins in history. Violet Gibson. Have you heard of? I feel like that there's one assassin.

• 37:45Robert Evans?

  I've heard the name.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. If there's one assassin, people have probably heard of Violet Gibson. This is the most widely known attempt on his life in the modern era, because it's the one that makes the coolest social media headline.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Is there like a song?

• 38:00Speaker 04

  There are. There's actually, there's songs about her, there's documentaries, yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  And I really hope I'm thinking of the right person, or else I'll sound dumb. She was like really short, right?

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's five foot one.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah, hell, yeah, so. I love stories about short ladies doing badass things. My grandma was like four foot 11.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Hell yeah.

• 38:18Robert Evans?

  My grandpa was 6'5". And because she was so small during World War II, she had a special job. They would hold her by her feet and shove her inside the wings of P-51 Mustangs so she could like weld them or like

• 38:33Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 38:33Robert Evans?

  do bolting or so. She was like welding them on the inside. There was like an area that needed welds that only the tiniest girls could fit.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Hell yeah.

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  Fucking rad.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Hell yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  As somebody who definitely can't reach things on the top shelf,

• 38:47Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  I'm very excited to hear more about Violet.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about today who successfully shot the man.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  Well done.

• 38:56Robert Evans?

  I mean, one of the lessons is that nobody knew how to shoot in the past.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:02Robert Evans?

  And most people don't know how to shoot today also.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Violet Gibson was a 49-year-old Irish woman from Dublin who lived in a convent in Rome and shot Mussolini in the face on April 7, 1926. What's not to like?

• 39:19Robert Evans?

  God, Ireland stays winning.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I know. Mostly, the parts to not like about this story is that he turned his head at the last minute.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he didn't die.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  And she only grazed his nose. But there are good pictures of him like with the like bandage on his nose or whatever.

• 39:35Robert Evans?

  Ah.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  There's no comparisons that can be made now to the modern world.

• 39:40Robert Evans?

  No.

• 39:41Speaker 05

  About people turning their heads?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and getting grazed. Yep.

• 39:44Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  Mm-mm.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  The world would have been a very different place if he had not turned his head.

• 39:49Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Violet Gibson was a thin woman, about five foot one. Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. She grew up, she's Anglo-Irish, right? And she grew up like-

• 39:59Robert Evans?

  Oh wow, so her like, they're like the English landlord Irish type deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like Lawrence of Arabia.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. And, uh, and like Lawrence of Arabia, she's crazy as shit. But people use this to invalidate and like claim that her action wasn't political or thought out. And that's what I want to argue against. But I can't argue against her being crazy as shit, and I'm gonna tell you why. But she grew up rich as hell. She was a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's Court, which I only vaguely understand what is through mostly my friends who are from the South. Most tellings of the story come down to, I don't know, she did it because she was crazy. I am going to make the case that she did it because she was a politically committed Catholic socialist who wanted to do right by God and people by killing a man who went on to be responsible for millions of deaths, who was also crazy.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  She was always esoteric. She was raised Protestant, right? Her mother became a Christian scientist, and so she herself experimented with Christian science. And then she got into theosophy for a while, but then she converted. She found another esoteric religion to get involved in Catholicism when she was 26, and she stayed a Catholic for the rest of her life. She was sick all of the time. Her body carried the scars of many surgeries. And she spent years working at various pacifist organizations. The craziest thing she did, which is left out of the leftist accounts of her story, but it's included in the right-wing accounts of her story that are like demonizing her, but they're verifiable, they're, I believe this happened.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  So she used to walk around Dublin with a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other.

• 41:37Robert Evans?

  And I hate to say it, but that is, that is pretty cool.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, no, like, yeah, no. She's, I would want to meet her, maybe from a distance, but I would want to meet her.

• 41:48Robert Evans?

  I would want to like, observe her from, from a safe distance.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. She talked all the time about the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally about like killing the urge to sin. But she seemed to want to kill. That was, that was part of her way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around 1920, she attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's face and hands. And so she spent two years in an asylum. And I don't know enough about that attack to know, like, if there's any motivation beyond, something about like she wanted to like replicate the sacrifice of so-and-so in the Bible or whatever.

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  When she got out, she moved to a convent in Rome. I believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're like super rich though, so you can go be in this convent. Her friends thought to themselves, she's probably gonna kill somebody, maybe the Pope. But they didn't try to stop her, which is really funny, because they're probably all Irish Catholics. And they're just like, eh, whatever. Then, in 1924, when Giacomo was murdered, the guy murdered to death with a carpenter's file.

• 43:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  She was heartbroken because she was a Catholic socialist, right? And so she decided to like revenge that killing by shooting herself in the chest. The bullet bounced off her ribs and she survived. And if you want to survive in the world that's coming, you need to buy literally everything that is advertised on this show. It is the only way to survive, I believe. It's not a guarantee, but here's ads.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  And we're back. Mussolini, at this point, God, I read a whole bunch of New York Times articles and like other like newspaper articles from this time, and they're all like Mussolini's great. We all like Mussolini because he's stopping the Bolsheviks, you know? Mussolini was being courted by the Western world. The King of England awarded him the Order of the Bath, which is not an order to take a bath, unfortunately, but instead a knighthood. And Violet Gibson decided that the way to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini. So she showed up at one of his talks in 1926 with a revolver and a rock. The rock was to break his windshield if necessary, which later assassins would have been more

• 44:22Speaker 04

  successful if they had also brought a rock. The modern mind can't really understand her motive, I think, because her motive was primarily religious, but it was also political. She did it to quote glorify God and an angel kept her arms steady. I told this story to a Catholic anarchist friend of mine, whose response was basically like, oh, those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned his head at the last minute. She grazed his nose. She tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've read that what he yelled at the time that he was shot was fancy a woman. But that might've been later. He told the crowd, don't be afraid. This is a mere trifle. And then like later, he went on this rant about how he's totally down to die violently

• 45:07Speaker 04

  as long as like a good glorious death. But if he's like killed by an old lady, he just can't handle it, which is why I wish Violet had succeeded over everyone else.

• 45:15Robert Evans?

  Ah, alas.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. The crowd caught her and beat her, and she was whisked away by the cops and declared insane.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  People said that she was paranoid, and that was why she tried to kill him, because she was paranoid. I hate to break it to the people of back then, she was correct about this particular thing. She spent the rest of her life in various institutions. She wrote letter after letter pleading to be set free, but those letters were never sent, because, you know, women are crazy, right? That's fine. That's a sarcastic remark. People probably caught on to that. She told people that her mood controlled the weather.

• 45:57Robert Evans?

  Okay, well, did it?

• 45:59Speaker 04

  If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like 3 million deaths. Maybe her moods, like I want to kill Mussolini, have a pretty major impact.

• 46:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. It reminds me of when I covered Joan of Arc on this show, where people are like, "Oh, feminist icon," except, you know, obviously she was just crazy with her visions from God. And it's just that people were conceiving of reality in different ways than we conceive of it now. And I think that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  She died in 1956 at the age of 79. She did outlive Mussolini. No family members came to her funeral. History has vindicated her, and there's now a plaque for her on her childhood home in Dublin that describes her accurately as a committed anti-fascist. And it was articles about this from like, right-wing Irish people, is how I learned about how she would run around and stab people and things like that.

• 46:54Robert Evans?

  Is it possible that there was like, no one at her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made a comment about Ireland staying winning, but Ireland's history, RE, the fascists in this period, is not particularly clean in large part because the fascists were in opposed to the British government. And so there was a lot of, at least the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing among the Irish, as well as the fact that Franco was like a Catholic, like, it's not a clean period for Ireland entirely either.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  It's not, but she's also Anglo-Irish, right?

• 47:27Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, that also makes sense. You're right. I'd forgotten that.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  And I think it's, I think overall, it was just like, "Oh, there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy. She just wanted to kill a guy," you know? That's like my best guess, but I'm not... I'm not certain. People didn't like her at the time, and now there's been kind of this this reclamation of her legacy. But Mussolini was particularly good at turning attempts on his life into popular support, which is like what you do if someone tries to kill you, right? You can either say like, "Oh, no, I'm afraid, and the enemy is scary and bad," which is not a good way to gain power. Or you can say like, "Ha, ha, ha, they can't get me, but they want to because they're evil," you know?

• 48:11Speaker 04

  Almost every article about attempts on Mussolini's life, from then or now, is basically like, "But this particular attempt is what Mussolini used to consolidate power. Everything was fine until this person tried to kill him, and then, whoosh, she just like swept in with fascism."

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, yeah, exactly. I think that that's people, number one, it's like working backwards, which you shouldn't do when you're trying to analyze people psychologically. Now that said, I don't know that I would say there's, it didn't have an impact on the character of the regime, just like it's probably fair to like, whatever Trump does next, the shooting will probably have impacted because it clearly affected his mental state, right?

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 48:53Robert Evans?

  Maybe it'll mean that he's a little less coherent and a little less like, maybe even less willing to take risks he might otherwise have taken. Maybe it'll mean he's more vengeful. We don't know yet. We'll all be learning soon. But it definitely, the presidency we are going to get out of him now is different than if he had won and nobody had shot him, right? Like, that's just, we don't know how, and we'll never know how, but that's just a reality because nearly being shot to death on live television changes you, changes anybody. You don't have to be a good person.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  And it's like, people talk about like hindsight is 2020, but it's not because you don't know what the other options were, you know? You can only see the one thing that happened.

• 49:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  Mussolini would have become dictator if no one had tried to kill him.

• 49:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  You know?

• 49:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  And it, he used moments like this to consolidate power because anyone would.

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because you, you, you can't let something like this go to waste. And also just like continuing to work after you've nearly been shot to death in the head, probably also just kind of mentally necessary. Like you're, you're, you're gonna make use of that because otherwise you're gonna sit alone in a room and think about how you nearly got your brains blown out.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 50:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, he keeps busy, you know?

• 50:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  He's got a lot of mistresses. Although New York Times just is gonna run articles, I'll talk about him later, but New York Times is like, oh, he's just hanging out with his family. He's a family man, like.

• 50:20Robert Evans?

  Oh, they loved Mussolini. Benito, I mean, a lot of Americans really liked Mussolini, in part because like, he was, he was a very, very much a celebrity dictator. In a way that Hitler, Hitler was, but not on this, like Hitler was, you know, famous and managed to become beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of like international, like movie star cloud, in part because he looked handsome in his photos in a way Hitler didn't really. Like, he looked like a movie star, you know? Not in real life, but he, you know, he had good, he had good people working. And he had a lot of movie stars hanging out with him, by the way, a lot of American ones.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  And he like, knew more about philosophy and art and shit like that, you know, which was like, a lot of the ways to be kind of like cool at the time. And like, I mean, he created a philosophy, one that is still around.

• 51:13Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  It's a bad one.

• 51:15Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  So there's another thing that's gonna tie into this, that is going on the Italian anarchist world and the Italian-American world, and just the news in general. And it's another thing that like, looking back, it's hard to see why this is as big of a deal as it was. And this is the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Have you heard of this?

• 51:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are the two American anarchists who there was a bombing. They got accused of it, uh, executed, didn't do it, right? Am I, am I okay on the basics there?

• 51:45Speaker 04

  So what's funny about it, it's messy. The, the, the general version is-

• 51:50Robert Evans?

  Usually it is.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:52Robert Evans?

  Uh, this was like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high school education.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  And it's probably the only time during anyone's high school education that the word anarchist gets mentioned, besides like, maybe you're gonna get, uh, Shogosh killing McKinley, but probably not.

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  I don't even think I, I learned about McKinley getting assassinated. I don't think I learned it was an anarchist, but maybe, maybe I'm just not, I, I barely remember high school.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like, "My high school teacher didn't teach me this," I'm like, "I don't know. How would I have known? I got Cs." Like, what, you know?

• 52:22Robert Evans?

  But I definitely remember knowing that Sacco and Vanzetti had been anarchists.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  Because that one was inescapable, and it was this incredibly important celebrity trial all over the world. And basically, some Italian-American anarchists, or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists, were robbing a guy who carried the wages, basically the equivalent of an armored truck robbery. And someone shot and killed the paymaster and a guard. Two Italian-American anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were put on trial. The entire leftist world, not just the anarchists, was convinced that they were innocent. And basically, this whole thing was seen as like a travesty of justice. In 1921, they were found guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for the state to kill them because the outcry was so much that they had to have all these appeals and investigations

• 53:12Speaker 04

  and things like that. This dragged on for years. Later historians have been like, "Well, Sacco probably did it. Uh, and Vanzetti, maybe?" Like, it's possible Vanzetti was there and therefore actually criminally liable, but like, didn't pull the trigger. It's also possible that they weren't there, because a lot of the evidence that they did do it comes from a guy we're gonna talk about later, who's an anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named- Mario Buddha.

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  Ah, well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of times the people who are most willing to make things like bombs are also driven more by rage than like political conviction and thus very easy to swing to a politics that entirely exists on the basis of rage.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:03Robert Evans?

  Which is, which is why we really do try here not to idolize people whose only contribution is that they did a violence.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 54:15Robert Evans?

  Even when everybody's making some very funny jokes on social media.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:21Robert Evans?

  Right now about a thing that just happened.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  No, it's, it's true. And that is like something that, um, yeah, fun time to have decided to write this episode. And, uh, but the important thing about the Sacco and Vanzetti case is that this trial was huge. The outcry was enormous. And one thing that happened in this is that the fascists tried hard to capitalize on it and did capitalize on it. Because most of the outcry against the trial was that the trial was unfair as a result of the US's anti-Italian and anti-anarchist bigotry. A fuck ton of the Italian-American crowd was either anarchist or fascist. And so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied

• 55:03Speaker 04

  for Sacco and Vanzetti. Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir up nationalism at home and continuing his odd overtures to the anarchists, even though he was in power by most of this point and he's cracking down on the anarchists left and right. His soldiers are burning photos of that guy Malatesta, anarchists are being rounded up and stuff. Yet Mussolini is telling his ambassadors to try and intervene on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti because Mussolini wanted to be seen as the man who protected Italians everywhere. And he has all these quotes that are like, "I cannot agree with anything that these men stand for, but they're Italian, by God, and America shouldn't kill them," or whatever. I'm now paraphrasing terribly.

• 55:49Robert Evans?

  Great stuff.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  And-

• 55:53Robert Evans?

  "I don't love their murders, but I support them being Italian. They, thus they ought to be free."

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  Fair enough.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  And what does this have to do with Violet Gibson? Well, this is gonna turn into one of the best zings against America that I've ever read about.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  On July 23rd, 1927, Mussolini wrote, "It is certain that the execution of Sacco van Zetti would provide the pretext for a vast and continuous agitation throughout the world. The fascist government, which is strongly authoritarian and does not give quarter to the Bolsheviks, very often employs clemency in individual cases. The governor of Massachusetts should not lose the opportunity for a humanitarian act whose repercussions would be especially positive in Italy." And fascist newspapers were now contrasting the American government as more totalitarian than the fascist Italian government because the Italian system, the fascist system, had

• 56:54Speaker 04

  let Violet Gibson return to her own country. And there is no death penalty in Italy at this point.

• 57:01Robert Evans?

  That's nice.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  People could literally kill kings and get life in prison, comparing this to the barbaric United States. And this is the thing that I love about it. It is like, the dude's got a point.

• 57:14Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  The US prison industrial system is like a nightmare.

• 57:18Robert Evans?

  It sure is.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  And was worse than the fascist government.

• 57:21Robert Evans?

  I mean, at the, you know, it depends on the stage, but at the early stages, you know, Mussolini does eventually invade Ethiopia and deploy chemical weapons. Uh, yeah, that that's certainly an argument that you could have made earlier in Mussolini's regime. You have to remember, he was not, he definitely was killing his political enemies.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. He stabbed a dude to death of a file.

• 57:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:43Robert Evans?

  Not necessarily in a way that's a higher body count than, for example, the number of black people being murdered by police in apartheid states in the United States, right?

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:53Robert Evans?

  Like, which is not a different thing to me. I don't consider that to be better than, I don't know, rounding up like a few dozen socialists and murdering them or whatever. Like, that and the constant mass, the constant murder at a pretty high rate of black men in the South by cops and vigilantes, like both, both things that I would put on a similar moral level.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like, Benito Mussolini is great, you know?

• 58:22Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't think you were. Yeah. I'm just saying, like, yeah, that's not an irrational statement to make at that point in time, knowing what they knew.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  And Violet, she was not alone in her quest to see the duke die.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  The next attempt was on September 11th, 1926. And this is why people remember September 11th.

• 58:44Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  And this is probably the most organized attempt. Sophie is, uh, clearly agrees with me.

• 58:50Robert Evans?

  Did anything else happen on September 11th? Ever? That seems like one of those-

• 58:54Speaker 04

  It was that coup that happened somewhere.

• 58:56Speaker 05

  That was such a smooth joke.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you.

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  I'm looking, I'm looking at my calendar of various September 11ths that I keep for no reason. Yeah, it doesn't look like anything's ever happened on another September 11th that I can-

• 59:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:07Robert Evans?

  That I've got. Okay.

• 59:09Speaker 05

  You're the funniest person I know.

• 59:10Robert Evans?

  That must be why I celebrate 9/11.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:13Robert Evans?

  Wait, no, shit.

• 59:15Speaker 05

  Robert!

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  Margaret, Margaret, I'm getting some very bad Google results suddenly. We need to edit that out. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, all those poor people, holy shit.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I lived in New York City on September 11th, 2001. So, saw the towers on fire. Uh, or saw the smoking remains. But, uh, anyway. The socialist politician had failed. The Catholic wingnut had failed. Time to bring in the professionals. If there's one group that knows about killing kings and monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again, we all know they failed, but you know what? They tried real hard. The next attempt was by a man named Gino Lucetti, who I'll tell you about, along with his cousin Gino.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  Because his name's Gino, but so is his cousin. That's the thing I'm saying. Well, I'll tell you about it on Wednesday.

• 1:00:05Speaker 05

  Woohoo!

• 1:00:05Robert Evans?

  Excellent. You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes after Tuesday. That's a little science fact for those of you in the audience.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  Robert, just thank you so much for telling us that. I have, I have no idea. I have no idea how we would have gone on.

• 1:00:18Robert Evans?

  We, we tried to shoot a little bit, a couple of facts your way.

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's why it's edutainment.

• 1:00:24Robert Evans?

  That's why it's edutainment, right?

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Robert Evans?

  So, remember, folks, Wednesday, day after Tuesday. Thursday comes the day before Monday. Uh, and that's all I gotta say.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Comes before Monday.

• 1:00:37Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. Tomorrow is Saturday.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  And after Monday is the weirdest thing about Thursday.

• 1:00:41Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. It's the day so nice, they made it happen twice.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Can't even, there's nothing I can do with that. Yup.

• 1:00:50Robert Evans?

  Oh, Morgan, I wish you and I could hang out all 11 days of the week.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  I know, I know, that'd be nice.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  But I only have so many hours in the day, and I don't remember how many it is.

• 1:01:00Robert Evans?

  Forty-one.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. No, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:01:04Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  But, Robert Evans, where can people find more about you, or what do you do?

• 1:01:10Robert Evans?

  Uh, well, you can find me sweating away in my basement, uh, because you and I only use, uh, an antique, uh, Coptic Christian calendar, uh, and day system based largely on, uh, a step pyramid, uh, that used to exist but was bulldozed in what was once Sumeria. Uh, so it's very, it takes a lot of time to remember what day it is.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Robert Evans?

  I don't, we really kept this bit going for a while.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  I feel like, at the end of a G.I. Joe episode where you tell kids to like not hide in refrigerators, right? I feel like it's worth pointing out that I really am talking about history here and that nothing necessarily good happened from any of the attempts that I'm describing. I am not morally against the attempts that I am describing. I'm clearly not of this thing that happened in the 1920s, but I want to be like clear on that, just for anyone.

• 1:01:59Robert Evans?

  That is the thing. I can think of very few assassinations in history where ultimately you would look at it and say that like, yeah, that worked out really well. Uh, particularly that worked out well by the person carrying out the assassination's standards. Really, the one that, like, Sageman-Talyrian, uh, who shot, you know, one of the young Turks who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great. Uh, by his standards and everyone else's. That guy who shot Abe seems to, the long run of that seems to have been positive. Very few other instances. Like, I, I, I don't know that I'd say McKinley worked out very well in the long run. Obviously, shooting the Archduke, fucking disaster.

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  No, it is worth thinking about that anarchists had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point. Propaganda by the deed was this anarchist idea that people are like, "Well, the masses don't really read theory, so let's just show them by killing all the kings and the, you know, the people who are in charge of them." And it overall was disastrous for the anarchist movement because it just led people to then defend the very systems that the anarchists were opposed to. And this happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During the pre, the run-up to the Russian Revolution, you have like about, from like 1903 to 1917, anarchists and other groups were all doing these attentats, all doing these assassinations.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  And it did lead to a revolutionary situation, which of course all kind of ended badly and created the USSR. But usually, these kind of things destroy a social movement. Sometimes, if enough people are interested in it, it builds a social movement. But usually, it doesn't. And that is the like, it's a crapshoot at best. It's a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and probably get something worse.

• 1:03:49Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:03:50Speaker 04

  But still, if someone had successfully killed Mussolini, I bet the world would have been a better place.

• 1:03:57Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. But the if, within the if, contains a lot of reasons why, you know, we're going to say for legal reasons here, assassinations, probably not worth it.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  And we're gonna talk about like five more of them on Wednesday.

• 1:04:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 05

  At the end here, I just want to plug, if you haven't listened, I just am plugging this on anything I can. I just want to plug our colleague James Stoudt's series from Reporting from the Darien Gap.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 05

  About one of the worst land migration places in the world and just, you know, the stories and people he talked to there. And I just want to plug that because it's an amazing series and I'm very proud of James.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  I started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet. It is really good.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  It's really good. Yeah, so if you have time around the end of the year and you're like, "Hmm, I need something to binge," James did five episodes.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  On It Could Happen Here.

• 1:04:57Speaker 05

  On It Could Happen, thank you. On It Could Happen Here.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  All right. See y'all on Wednesday.

• 1:05:03Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 1:07:33Robert Evans?

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• 1:08:19Robert Evans?

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• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, people try to confront those bad things in various ways, lots of various ways. One of the way, no, just a person. One of the people who's also on this podcast with me is Robert Evans, my guest. Hi.

• 1:09:02Robert Evans?

  That's right. Ah, I'm Robert Evans and, uh... I'm Robert Evans, that's me.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  Well, I brought you on because you're an expert about Italy.

• 1:09:15Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I know several things about Italians, Margaret. Number one, buca di beppo. Number two, spicy meatball.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  Here's where we remind the listeners that Robert Emmens is Italian.

• 1:09:27Robert Evans?

  Whatever the hat is that they, that the chefs wear and those kind of racist caricatures.

• 1:09:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:33Robert Evans?

  Look, it's fine. We all decided that it's okay with Italians now.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, despite the huge trial that we talked about last time about anti-Italian prejudice in the United States.

• 1:09:44Robert Evans?

  Look, if they'd been, I have the opposite position of that guy. I'm fine with the murder. If they'd been on trial for being Italian, I would have said, fucking, you know?

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Hang 'em high.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe upside down.

• 1:09:58Robert Evans?

  Maybe.

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  That's a dead Mussolini joke, which is unfortunately not gonna happen in today's episode. A lot of people are gonna try. Give the old college try. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie.

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  It's me. I'm Sophie. Hi.

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  I realized when I got my podcast you listened to the most in 2024, that four of them were Sophie podcasts.

• 1:10:22Speaker 05

  The loyalty is unmatched. Unmatched.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  I'm a little bit surprised that, um, that not all five were, but I think the problem was that the Pathfinder podcast I listened to has really long episodes.

• 1:10:36Speaker 05

  You need one break.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  So I listened to like five.

• 1:10:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, you need one break from me.

• 1:10:39Robert Evans?

  We should do a Pathfinder podcast, Margaret.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  I would love to do a live play podcast.

• 1:10:43Robert Evans?

  Maybe I'll reach out to the guy who created Pathfinder and listens to our podcasts and talk to him about that.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  I would love that guy who created Pathfinder. Um, y'all are great and your system rules and I play it anyway. So, but yeah, no, Cool Zone Media needs a live play podcast. That's all I'm saying. And if you, listener, agree, bug these people on the internet about it and then, because I needed more podcasts to be on, whatever. I don't care.

• 1:11:13Robert Evans?

  We, there's a shortage of podcasts. I don't know if you're aware of this.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Robert Evans?

  But the, the CDC has said that it's probably the largest threat to our national collective health.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  Well, it's the only thing that they're trying to put a tariff on that everyone's in favor of, is that they're trying to make it harder for people to make podcasts.

• 1:11:28Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  All podcast mics. Oh my God, that actually is good. Most of the podcast mics are probably not made in the US. Whatever, I got mine.

• 1:11:37Robert Evans?

  I have no idea. I have no idea where they make our microphones, Margaret.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  No, no, I do not.

• 1:11:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Anyway, this is part two on a two-part episode about people trying to kill Mussolini. Later, we'll probably talk about the people who succeeded. It took a whole war. But some people tried to just cut to the chase and circumvent the need for the war. And we've already mentioned several of them, but we're gonna talk a lot more of them today. First, we're gonna talk about Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi Rory.

• 1:12:11Robert Evans?

  Hi Rory. Hi Rory.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  And that our theme music was written for us by On Woman. And that Gino Lucetti was born working class in the year 1900 in Carrara, Tuscany.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  Ever heard of Carrara?

• 1:12:27Robert Evans?

  I've heard of Tuscany, because the Tuscan coast is pretty famous. I've never heard of Carrara. Other than that, it makes me think of that song that goes tarara boom de, which I don't know what that's a reference to. Is that a slur?

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  I have no idea.

• 1:12:41Robert Evans?

  I should probably look into that song, see if there was anything fucked up. It's like celebrating a genocide. That's often the case with old songs. What a lovely tune. Oh, no!

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, Carrara is famous for two things. It is famous for its marble quarries. It produces some of the finest marble, from which the most iconic buildings and statues in the world are made. There's a whole list of them, and I forgot to write them down. But like, think of an old Italian statue from Rome, old Rome, and the marble might have come from Carrara. It has like, blue veins. I spent way too long reading about this marble.

• 1:13:21Robert Evans?

  It's good ass marble. Yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  The other thing that Carrara is famous for is anarchism.

• 1:13:28Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  When my anarchist friends took me through Italy, when we were near Carrara, they pointed out, and they were like, hey, that's, that place was an anarchist stronghold for a long, long time, among the stonemasons who put that town on the map. Enough so that I was like double checking this today. I was like, Carrara, that sounds familiar, right? And I was looking at a mainstream tour company's website, Carrara Marble Tour, and they offer an anarchic Carrara tour.

• 1:13:52Robert Evans?

  Oh, wow. Really double dipping. I mean, and that's, you know, because there's so many, it's like you and I always say, Margaret, with so many anarchists in our audience, you know, every, there's, there's nothing that goes together, like anarchism and marble quarries.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Robert Evans?

  Two, two great tastes that taste great together, you know? That's why, by the way, let's have a word for our sponsor, Big Marble. Marble. Maybe we could use it again for some stuff.

• 1:14:20Speaker 04

  Marble, one time, statute of limitations ago, I had to empty all the marbles out of my pocket before a mass arrest.

• 1:14:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Marble, if you use it to make all of your streets and sidewalks like they do in Greece, it makes things incredibly treacherous in the rain. Actually horrible, horrible material to use the way that they use it.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's pretty, though.

• 1:14:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  Years and years ago, my dad told me this, this spooky story that he wrote called The Thirty Seven Marble Steps. And I was like a kid, so I was just assuming that these were steps with marbles embedded in them. But Gina Lusetti was from Carrara. In the early 1920s, there are factory occupations all over Italy. I don't know enough about these yet, but they've come up a bunch of times, and they'll probably be one of their own episodes at one of these points. And I know that in the end of these factory occupations, the socialist parties kind of gave up and gave power back to the bosses, which made an awful lot more anarchists from those socialists who, you know, had just seized

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  the means of production and were like, but isn't this our goal? Isn't our goal that the workers control the means of production? Why would we give them back? I don't know enough about the ins and outs of that struggle, but a lot of people were mad. Gina Lucetti was at these occupations and somewhere along the way, he got into a gunfight with the black shirts. He got a guy in the ear who got him in the neck in return.

• 1:15:52Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  This second time we've had an anti fascist get it in the neck and survive on this show. The other one was George Orwell.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, I mean, I'm not going to say, but that's very lucky.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Don't get shot in the neck.

• 1:16:07Robert Evans?

  The neck is very low on the number of places on your body you would want to get shot.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, not a good tourniquet spot, it turns out.

• 1:16:14Robert Evans?

  Hard to tourniquet a neck unless you're Google AI, which has told me repeatedly that you can tourniquet the neck.

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:16:22Robert Evans?

  That's just a hanging, folks. You're just strangling someone to death.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 1:16:29Robert Evans?

  Don't tourniquet necks.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it seems self evident, but an AI is not, does not have our best interests in heart.

• 1:16:36Robert Evans?

  No, it just sees, well, there's fucking, there's fucking arteries there. Tourniquet away.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it attaches a limb, if a head is a limb, the appendage, I don't know, whatever, whatever a head is anatomically. I guess it's a head. So he couldn't find a doctor in Italy to get the bullet out. I do not know why. So comrades smuggled him to France where he was finally treated. And he was like, you know what? I don't need to be in Italy right now. They are in the middle of a fascism and I am in the middle of just got shot in the neck by a fascist.

• 1:17:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

  There was a large political refugee scene in France at the time. Anarchists, socialists and communists had formed a popular front against fascism there, not only just in general in France, but like specifically the Italian refugees had. They were like, all right, look, all that stuff going on in Russia. We're all mad at each other, but right now Italy is being taken over by fascists. We got to do something about that.

• 1:17:33Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  And they all agreed what needed to be done was kill Mussolini.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  And this action was intended to be anything but a propaganda of the deed action, which is, I think, actually a really important point for, you know, what we ended on talking about last week?

• 1:17:50Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  As a libcom.org article put it, quote, "Propaganda of the deed attacks were supposed to inspire the working classes to rise, and in this, they were entirely unsuccessful. In this instance, however, the urge to kill Mussolini was the expression of a convergence of opinion among many popularly representative political groupings, and was commonly perceived as a necessity at that point in time." So it wasn't like, "Oh, we're gonna spur on the revolution and radicalize people by showing them that, you know, our opponents are made of flesh and blood." It was like, "No, Mussolini is basically the enemy war leader that we're in a war against," you know?

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  One word that has never been successfully applied to anarchists is cowardice. Gino agreed to do the deed, and-

• 1:18:41Robert Evans?

  I mean, it's the thing that you come across over and over again when you read about militant movements and civil wars and where there are anarchist groups, is that the anarchists are always very brave, not always the best fighters-

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Robert Evans?

  -but always very brave.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, and specifically, other groups like putting us in the front.

• 1:19:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's an aspect of it.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I remember when I first became an anarchist, I was like, just going to protest and things 27 years ago, and my roommate in college was like, "You anarchists, you're just the berserkers of the protest movement. People just throw you in the front to soak up all the damage." And I was like, "No." He was a little bit right, at least in terms of how people perceive us and use us. So, of course, when they're like, "Who's going to go risk their life to go do this?" An anarchist volunteered.

• 1:19:38Speaker 04

  And twice he returned to Italy to meet with comrades there to plan the assassination. And they met aboard a ship at sea, which is aesthetic as fuck, off the Tuscany coast. And this time, there were no informants among them. He had several co-conspirators worth mentioning. Stefano Vateroni was an anarchist tinsmith from Rome, who was the secretary of the library, the fucking librarian was in on this assassination. The secretary of Mussolini's library supplied all of the details, including Mussolini's routes by car. Vateroni funded the thing by selling his family's land near Carrara. Another anarchist, Leandro Sorio, was a waiter who was planning to finance the group's escape from the country.

• 1:20:22Speaker 04

  But then they all decided, basically, they were like, well, we're actually just all gonna get arrested and stand trial.

• 1:20:28Robert Evans?

  There you go.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  We wanna make a statement. Malatesta, the anarchist guy who's old at this point, was briefed on the plan and signed off on it. So this wasn't a, like, spur-of-the-moment attack. This was a, you know, huge conspiracy across borders to try and kill this guy. Our man Gino went back to Italy, and he went to Rome. He waited for Mussolini's car, and then he threw a pineapple grenade at it. The grenade had been made by his cousin, and he threw it into the windshield. Famously, grenades are on timers, not like, pressure-sensitive. They like, don't explode on impact.

• 1:21:05Robert Evans?

  No, cuz that would be very dangerous. Margaret, have I told you the story about the Iraqi soldier? We're behind this berm, embedded with this unit of the Iraqi federal police that are in this very active gunfight with some ISIS guys. But they're also kinda showing off, cuz like, I'm there and my photographer's there with the camera. And so like, one of the dudes, one of the dudes clips into the buttons of his, like, button-up shirt, a grenade over each button. He like, sticks the little handle arm of the grenade around, and he like, runs up and he like, fires. And then he leans over to pick up a magazine that's like, lying behind the berm, and all of the grenades fall off of his shirt and roll down directly towards me?

• 1:21:50Robert Evans?

  So thankfully, they're not set off by impact.

• 1:21:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, fair enough. In this case, it didn't get through the windshield. This is the guy who should've brought a rock.

• 1:22:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  Violet Gibson was right, you need to get through the windshield. The grenade bounced a few meters away and exploded. Mussolini's bodyguards caught up with Gino and beat the shit out of him.

• 1:22:13Robert Evans?

  That sounds about right, yeah.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  And when they arrested him, they found him with a second bomb, a handgun with six hollow points poisoned with muriatic acid, which I don't know anything about, and a dagger.

• 1:22:24Robert Evans?

  Isn't muriatic acid the thing in, like, swimming pools?

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  Isn't that chlorine?

• 1:22:29Robert Evans?

  No, no, I mean, I think you have muriatic acid for swimming pools, too. I remember I've seen, like, jars. One sec.

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

  I actually didn't want to Google this today. That's what happened to me today, is I was like, I wonder what this stuff is.

• 1:22:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you use muriatic acid to lower, like, pH in your pool. It's like, like a shit, millions of Americans have this shit in, like, their shed.

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:22:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 04

  I have no idea why you would. I, either he was being really extra, or like...

• 1:22:53Robert Evans?

  Or he just thought it, he might have thought it was more sketchy than it was, I don't know.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, this one says acid, you know?

• 1:23:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, when it's really, it's not that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know much about it. Other than that, I know I've seen it in people's, like, backyards, because they have pools.

• 1:23:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also, like, there's so much myth building, both positively and negatively, about all of these things, you know? So it could have been like, oh, he had a dagger and muriatic acid. It actually used the word dum-dum bullets instead of hollow points, because that's what they called a round that expands at the time, you know? So he's tortured, he gives a false name and location, and eventually they get the truth out of him. Lucetti was given 30 years in prison. The waiter got 20 years, and the tinsmith got 19 years and nine months. 30 years is the maximum anyone's allowed to be given in Italy at the time. Which, again, more, I mean, later they're gonna start killing people, but...

• 1:23:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  For three years, Lucetti was in solitary and had only a sparrow that would visit at the window for company.

• 1:23:55Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Robert Evans?

  It's his best friend, the sparrow. I mean, that's sweet, actually.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:24:01Robert Evans?

  I bet he was giving it some of his, like, very, very rare bread that he didn't have a whole lot of, because he was a nice man.

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, he, he lived off of, I think it's just literally soup and bread, and...

• 1:24:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that sounds about right.

• 1:24:15Speaker 04

  He died after 17 years in prison, in 1943. He died during a US air raid. Some claim that he was killed by the shelling, but the man who identified the body said that he had been killed by the occupying Germans during the raid. The Italian communists tried to claim his legacy. They published that one of his fellow inmates claimed he had become a communist in his later years. But his brother and his fiance, who kept visiting him until the end of his days, denied this adamantly. Like, no, he was an anarchist, he died an anarchist. During the partisan reclamation of Italy, two different anarchist battalions named themselves after Gino Lucetti. Each was about 60 fighters, I believe both men and women.

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  I know one of the other anarchist battalions I'm going to talk about later was both men and women. And they helped rid Italy of fascism. So he, he won, in a way, after his death. And that is all most of us can hope for, I would say.

• 1:25:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, in the long run, it's all any of us can hope for, right? Because as we've, as we've seen, every struggle worth fighting occurs over a long timeframe.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. As for the man who made the bomb, that's a different story, about another Gino, because his cousin's name was also Gino. And I want to tell you about that story, but did you know what I want to tell you about more?

• 1:25:36Robert Evans?

  Uh, products?

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  I love products.

• 1:25:41Robert Evans?

  Services, maybe. I don't know if you'd ever, if there'd ever be a service on here.

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  I do like a good service.

• 1:25:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay, okay, fascinating.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, yeah, whatever, whatever they pay me to talk about, or whatever they pay someone else to talk about and then insert into my podcast.

• 1:25:57Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, all right.

• 1:25:58Speaker 04

  I'm really excited about. Uh, here.

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  And we're back.

• 1:26:10Robert Evans?

  We are.

• 1:26:13Speaker 04

  Gino Lucetti had a cousin, Gino Bibby. Very serious country, as you said.

• 1:26:18Robert Evans?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  Gino Bibby was from a more middle-class background. His father owned a sawmill. Gino Bibby, um, did you know an anarchist invented the missile?

• 1:26:31Robert Evans?

  No, was he like a scientist being forced to do stuff by the not?

• 1:26:37Speaker 04

  So I'm gonna get to it.

• 1:26:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know what? That's gotta be one of the top anarchism fails.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it didn't work out well in the end.

• 1:26:45Robert Evans?

  I would say missiles. I mean, there's definitely some anarchists, you know, and anarchist related groups that have used missiles and are using them right now. But, uh, boy, howdy, it's a general rule, not a tool that has that has reduced state power.

• 1:27:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, that's an L.

• 1:27:03Speaker 04

  I know, and it's so messy.

• 1:27:04Robert Evans?

  That's a big L for us.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  And if you Google, I'll talk about a little bit more later when he actually does the inventing, but I get to it. But if you Google who invented the missile, you get the Nazis. But he's gonna pull out missiles, guided missiles that go 20 kilometers in the Spanish Civil War.

• 1:27:20Robert Evans?

  Shit.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  Missile in this case being a rocket, but guided.

• 1:27:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  And as a teen, this second Gino, Gino Bibby, went around on a bicycle and distributed anarchist leaflets until fascist dragged him off his bike, beat him up, burned his motorcycle, and then burned his father's sawmill.

• 1:27:41Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Because they were a little extra, the fascists. This did not make Gino less radical. It just made him more angry. He's gonna have the last laugh against fascists in Italy.

• 1:27:51Robert Evans?

  That is often how things go. Yeah.

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. He spent a while in lockup for fighting fascists in the early 1920s, then fled to Spain, where he started learning how to fly in case he needed to assassinate Mussolini from the air.

• 1:28:03Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  Which is kind of like how I learned a while ago for a prison break episode that an awful lot of the prison breaks in the early aughts were.

• 1:28:11Robert Evans?

  It used to be a lot easier to get a helicopter. Yeah.

• 1:28:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Learn to fly. That's how you've got people out of prison back in the day.

• 1:28:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Speaker 04

  Come the Spanish Civil War, he worked behind enemy lines, blowing shit up and flying reconnaissance. And then he maybe designed the first missile. If you Google right now, the first missile, you get Nazi Germany, World War II. But Gino designed missiles that went 20 kilometers and the Derudy column fired them at Francoist forces. So it started off as a good idea, just a very Pandora's box.

• 1:28:41Robert Evans?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  You know what else the anarchists, this is not a products and services switch, do you know what else anarchists invented during the Spanish Civil War?

• 1:28:49Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:28:50Speaker 04

  You ever played foosball?

• 1:28:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, is that ours?

• 1:28:53Speaker 04

  Did you ever know an anarchist named Alejandro, I forget his last name because it's not my script, invented foosball?

• 1:28:58Robert Evans?

  Alejandro Foose? Let's call it, let's say Alejandro Foose. Cool.

• 1:29:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a, again, I'm completely off script here and going from memory, but there was a guy who was injured in the Spanish Civil War and he was like an inventor. And he was like, but I want to keep playing soccer, but I can't because I got really badly injured. I'm going to invent table soccer. And other people had invented it, but his invention is the one that people play today.

• 1:29:24Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  So.

• 1:29:25Robert Evans?

  Fascinating.

• 1:29:26Speaker 04

  Spanish Civil War, the anarchists gave us missiles and foosball.

• 1:29:30Robert Evans?

  To, the, the two key cornerstones of the, of modern civilization. Missiles and foosball.

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Meanwhile, while Gino is inventing missiles and doing spec ops missions, the Stalinists murdered his sister. Listen to any of our episodes about the Spanish Civil War for more about how Stalinists betrayed their comrades and started arresting folks that they didn't like and torturing people and killing them. The Stalinists actually arrested Gino too, but the anarchists in the government, which is another odd thing that happened in the Spanish Civil War, were like, oh no, fuck no. And the Stalinists were forced to let him out. When the Spanish Republic fell, like everyone else, he fled into France and was held in a concentration camp, not a Nazi one, but a pre-Vichy France one. Wherefrom he escaped, and then he moved back to Italy and he joined the partisans there.

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  And he freed his own fucking hometown from fascists as part of an anarchist partisan unit. I really like this guy. To quote author Nick Heath, "He died at the age of 100 on the 8th of August, 1999. He was cremated with a red and black scarf tied around his neck. His ashes were interred in the anarchist corner of the graveyard in Carrara."

• 1:30:43Robert Evans?

  Man, that's, that's dope.

• 1:30:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Robert Evans?

  Also, 1999, great year to kind of clock out.

• 1:30:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Robert Evans?

  Missed, missed a lot of Messiness, got to see most of the good Star Treks.

• 1:30:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  And, uh, yeah, Gino Beebe, I got kinda teary when I was writing about the life of the anarchist spy pilot bomb maker engineer partisan and inventor.

• 1:31:07Robert Evans?

  Spylet, spylet, Margaret.

• 1:31:09Speaker 04

  Oh, spylet, yes, the spylet.

• 1:31:11Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  And inventor of the guided missile system, which, again, not our best move. Later, I'm gonna talk about a military invention, or actually a terrorism invention of the anarchist that's even worse.

• 1:31:24Robert Evans?

  Uh-oh.

• 1:31:25Speaker 04

  The Irish are mostly famous for it, but it was an Italian anarchist who later became a fascist. Anyway, back to our main story, people trying to kill Mussolini. Only a few months after Gino I threw Gino II's grenade at Mussolini, another young hero stepped forward to give it his all. A really young hero, kind of a, this is the most heartbreaking part of the story, a 15-year-old kid who had just quit the fascist youth and become an anarchist.

• 1:31:52Robert Evans?

  That's good for him.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  Antio Zamboni.

• 1:31:57Robert Evans?

  God damn it.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  I promised you Zamboni.

• 1:32:00Robert Evans?

  Get Jamie Loftus on the horn, she needs to know about this name.

• 1:32:04Speaker 04

  I genuinely thought, I was very glad that you were my guest until I got to Zamboni and I was like, if I was gonna have anyone else, it would be Jamie Loftus. Also, more experienced killing, never mind, um...

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 1:32:17Speaker 04

  No, I'm not allowed to join the bit about trying to implicate, okay, just checking.

• 1:32:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:32:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, until the court case is over and the grand jury rules on the new evidence brought forward in that case, we probably should keep our mouths quiet.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  By a mysterious person with a bad fake Boston accent?

• 1:32:34Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:32:36Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  For anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, I'm proud of you.

• 1:32:41Speaker 05

  Well done, way to be less terminally online.

• 1:32:45Speaker 04

  You should listen to Jamie Loftus's podcasts.

• 1:32:47Speaker 05

  You should.

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  Antio Zamboni was born into a working-class political family in Bologna. His parents were anarchists who became fascists, or at least his father had. He was never baptized, his parents only had a civil union because they refused to let the state or the church have anything to do with their marriage before they became fascists. His father, Mamolo Zamboni, when he became a fascist, the New York Times called it, quote, "disassociating from radical action." Because being an anarchist is radical, being a fascist is normal, according to the New York Times in 1926.

• 1:33:23Robert Evans?

  And now.

• 1:33:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  Mamolo called himself, quote, "an anarchist and a fascist." So, what a guy.

• 1:33:33Robert Evans?

  I mean, there's a lot of that, too, unfortunately. You could look into, there's a, I mean, he considered himself and was very angry about other anarch- like, people who called themselves anarchists, because he had a different attitude towards it, but, uh, the guy who wrote, uh, Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger, was like, called himself an anarch, uh, and I guess the difference is, he just believed in anarchism for himself, as like, an individual choice, while still serving the Nazi state. He was kind of an incoherent fella, politically, in my opinion, but wrote a very good World War I memoir.

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  Well, I think that that sounds like approximately half of the modern Libertarian Party, that the other half of the Libertarian Party is very embarrassed about.

• 1:34:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  Antio had two brothers, one of whom was in a fascist militia, the other of whom was in the army. Antio was a young anarchist with way better politics than his dad. And he took a shot at Mussolini while the man drove past him in an open car. He missed, he pierced the fascist collar, and the crowd killed him. Just stabbed this child to death. Uh, I've, you know how a 15-year-old either looks like a kid or an adult?

• 1:34:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50Speaker 04

  Antio's a kid. This is a child.

• 1:34:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  I mean, every 15-year-old is a child, but the crowd knew they were killing a child.

• 1:34:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, they did not, it was not just like, somebody who, like, could have passed for 17 or 18, like, they were very aware they were killing a kid.

• 1:35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he could have passed for 12.

• 1:35:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, gotcha.

• 1:35:09Speaker 04

  Um, I looked at the, I don't normally do this to myself, but I looked at the corpse photo, because the only other photos that anyone has of him is when he's like, 8, you know? And, "His coward fascist father tried to distance himself from the actions of his son, until after the war, but we'll get to that." The New York Times reported the father walked into the police station to see the body and said, quote, "I knew it would happen, it was faded, he was a strange boy with strange notions, I had a dreadful premonition that something would happen to him, our doctor said he might go mad one day." This is the father trying to save his own ass. It's not gonna work. Then New York Times writes a little glowing article about Mussolini playing his violin with his wife and kids at home, taking solace after the attack.

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  Then they talk about how everyone is saying that if Mussolini stays alive, fascism will keep Italy normal and peaceful. But if he were killed-

• 1:36:03Robert Evans?

  That seems like what fascism will do, yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. Violent fascists might take over if Mussolini is killed. And on that exact same page of the New York Times from 1926, there's a different article about fascist black shirts raiding anti-fascist newspapers at gunpoint.

• 1:36:21Robert Evans?

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:22Speaker 04

  But you know, whatever.

• 1:36:23Robert Evans?

  But like in a normal way, you know?

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Speaker 04

  "Being a fascist did not protect Mammolo, the father. He and his sister-in-law were both sentenced to 30 years for being vaguely connected to Antio." Basically, they're like, "Oh, the kid couldn't have come up with doing it. It must have been a plot by previously anarchy dad." But by 1932, the elder Zamboni received a pardon directly from Mussolini in exchange for becoming an informant for the fascists.

• 1:36:50Robert Evans?

  Ah.

• 1:36:51Speaker 04

  Then, after the war, Mammolo went 180 again and started writing pamphlets speaking of the courage of his son and started publishing anarchist material again.

• 1:37:01Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:37:02Speaker 04

  He died in 1952, and he's not the only anarchist in this story who went fascist and then anarchist again.

• 1:37:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  This guy, I don't like him.

• 1:37:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, again, a lot of people, it's just like, a lot of people are more, will always be a decent number of people, sizable minority, always mostly just driven by whatever's pissing them off in the moment, you know, as opposed to principles.

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  Totally. I'm just so mad at him for turning his back on his kid and trying to throw his dead kid under the bus to save his own ass and then later-

• 1:37:33Robert Evans?

  I mean, he sounds like a guy who sucks.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Robert Evans?

  Sounds like a guy, a bastard that maybe someone should get behind.

• 1:37:39Speaker 04

  I know, he's kind of a little weird guy, too.

• 1:37:42Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  After Antio's attempts on Mussolini, all other political parties were outlawed. But they already didn't have any power, and Mussolini was gonna do that anyhow, is my argument. This more or less ends open anarchist organizing in Italy, as I understand it. And Mussolini brings back the death penalty now for anyone trying to kill him or the king. That didn't stop people from trying to kill him. No one tries to kill a dictator thinking it's a safe thing to do.

• 1:38:11Robert Evans?

  Nope. Yeah, nobody's ever killed a dictator being like, "This is more relaxing than staying home at night and reading the newspaper."

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, "I'm gonna get away from this just fine."

• 1:38:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  Although later, the people who do kill Mussolini do.

• 1:38:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's a different time. That's really not an assassination.

• 1:38:32Speaker 04

  No, no. The next attempt we're gonna talk about is a man who, like Gattano Bresci before him, abandoned the safety of the United States and kind of abandoned his family there to return to Italy to try and do what was right. His name was Michele Shiru.

• 1:38:50Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Which, to me, looks like it's spelled Michelle, if anyone's curious. But it's like the French, but it's not. It's Italian, so it's Michele. Michele Shiru was born in 1899 on Sardinia, which is an Italian island. His father had already emigrated to the US, and Michele was raised by his mother. He was twice arrested in demonstrations as a kid. He was conscripted into World War I, and, like a lot of anarchists at the time, he was hoping the war would turn into a war of liberation.

• 1:39:19Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:20Speaker 04

  It did not, famously.

• 1:39:22Robert Evans?

  That's a bummer.

• 1:39:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Michele became convinced of anarchism after the Communist Party, he felt, sold out the factory occupations and let the bosses back in. He eventually moves to Manhattan, he starts fighting Italian fascists in the streets. He worked as a mechanic, and then he became a banana wholesaler in the Bronx. He married an Irish-American woman named Minnie. He had two kids, I think he had a son and a daughter. But he was watching Italy fall to fascism, and he couldn't handle it. He was like, "Someone's gotta do something. I'm someone. I'm gonna do something." He went first to France and then likely coordinated with anarchists there, but he kept his mouth shut about it. So we never know, we'll never know like who else

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  was involved, because they were never arrested. He went up to Belgium and he worked in an anarchist bomb-making workshop. I don't know, there's like a like fly, you go to like the punk show and there's a flyer. It's like, "Hey, come to the anarchist bomb-making workshop this Saturday."

• 1:40:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  But he made himself two bombs, and then he traveled to Rome in January 1931.

• 1:40:26Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  We've only got his confession under duress to work from, so we don't, you know, famously not always the most honest.

• 1:40:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not, not a great source.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. But his original plan, he said, was that he was going to use the bombs in Paris against the Soviet Embassy in revenge for the murder of anarchists in the USSR. But then he decided to kill Mussolini himself. I, I think that that was his backup plan. I think that he went to, I think he went back to Europe to try and kill Mussolini.

• 1:40:56Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:57Speaker 04

  But in Rome, he rented two hotel rooms, one for himself and one for his bombs, because bombs need privacy too, you know?

• 1:41:05Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Of course, yes. That's actually my primary political issue.

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Robert Evans?

  Is extending privacy rights to modern military explosives, you know?

• 1:41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Robert Evans?

  Nobody needs to know what a couple of JDAMs get up to in their spare time. That's, that's between them and God and whatever village they're hitting.

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  While he was there, he was either shacking up with or conspiring with a Hungarian dancer named Anna Lukowski. If I were writing the story, it would be both. Also, everyone writes sex work out of history, so I would put money that she was a sex worker, but that doesn't make her less or more likely to have been one of the conspirators. And there is reason to believe that he is part of a broader conspiracy working, but he never rats them out. And the reason that we think this is that he spent money really freely while he was there. He was renting two hotel rooms, but he had no money on him when he was arrested. And there was like no money in any of the rooms or whatever, right? So he was probably working with a bunch of people who wanted Mussolini dead. A lot of people wanted Mussolini dead.

• 1:42:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, for some reason.

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  His plan was really simple. One of his hotel rooms overlooked a common route for Mussolini's car. He was going to wait and drop a bomb on Mussolini. But he wanted to do it when there was no bystanders around.

• 1:42:26Robert Evans?

  Of course.

• 1:42:27Speaker 04

  And this is a thing that like has come up a bunch of times on this show, but has left out a lot of the the sensationalist stuff about bomb assassinations is all of the bystanders who get killed. There have been so many times in history, and there's gonna be two in this episode, where people don't do it because they can't find a way to do it without hurting people.

• 1:42:48Speaker 04

  He's there for like three weeks and he can't find a way to not hurt anyone else. He had all but given up and he was figuring he'd go back to Paris and attack the Soviets instead. When he was stopped on the street by cops on February 3rd, 1931. And I think he was just like stopped for being a sketchy guy because it's a fascist state, you know? And they take him to a holding cell for investigation. There were three cops in the room. He pulled a gun and shot all three cops.

• 1:43:18Robert Evans?

  Wow.

• 1:43:20Speaker 04

  And then he shouted, "Long live anarchy" and put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.

• 1:43:25Robert Evans?

  Well, okay.

• 1:43:27Speaker 04

  All four men survived.

• 1:43:29Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:43:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Robert Evans?

  Wow. I mean, that does have to win my award for worst with a gun of anyone on this podcast. To shoot four people, including yourself, and have them all live is a real...

• 1:43:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Robert Evans?

  Honestly, though, I gotta say, given the time, some of that probably just goes down to how much worse ammunition was back then. You know, powder loads were less reliable. He may have loaded them himself, you know?

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like, I think he like, he seriously injured one of the cops and himself.

• 1:43:57Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:43:58Speaker 04

  He was like rushed to emergency surgery and they, you know, wanted him fit to stand trial.

• 1:44:05Robert Evans?

  Right. Stand trial for killing no one?

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  That's actually part of the thing. Uh, I was reading newspapers at the time and they were like, "Look, shooting cops didn't carry the death penalty. So it actually was against their own laws to try and give him the death penalty." But he admitted that he was there to kill Mussolini. In fact, he pretty much, they were like, "What are you doing?" He was like, "I'm here to kill Mussolini."

• 1:44:33Speaker 04

  He tried to write his wife, and his wife tried to write him while he was in jail, but their letters were confiscated. He wrote to his father, to the same effect. In May 1931, he was tried by a fascist judge with no jury, and all the lawyers and witnesses had to be put before a special tribunal before they could come in. His defense was, basically, "I came here to blow up Mussolini." During the trial, he decried both fascism and communism. They told him he would be executed, shot in the back. He didn't say a word as the sentence came down. When he was asked if he had anything to add, he shrugged his shoulders. At 2:30 a.m. the next morning, they came into his cell and told him he would

• 1:45:14Speaker 04

  be killed at sunrise. He said he did not need a priest, and he was shot in the back by a firing squad of 24 fascists, folks from his home of Sardinia who had volunteered specifically to kill him.

• 1:45:27Robert Evans?

  Well, I guess that's a nice... At least you're... No, it's your guys you went to high school with murdering you. That actually sounds much worse.

• 1:45:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. His wife, Minnie, lived to 1987, dying at 83. Their son, Spartaco, died in 2005. I found an article I couldn't get access to behind an academic wall of Spartaco writing about his father, and I'm kind of sad I couldn't get it. But here's an assassin who didn't go through with his actions because he couldn't do it without hurting anyone else. Now, let's talk about the opposite.

• 1:46:09Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  But before that, let's talk about the other opposite: products and services.

• 1:46:14Robert Evans?

  Ah, I love products and services.

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  Someone's gonna get hurt.

• 1:46:18Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. That's the promise we make.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  Here they are.

• 1:46:35Robert Evans?

  And we're Burt.

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  We are Burt. Now I'm gonna talk about my least favorite anarchist in history.

• 1:46:42Robert Evans?

  Oh. There's a couple of jokes, there's a couple of jokes I could make about people we know, but...

• 1:46:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. My least favorite anarchist I've never met. You don't stay in a political scene without making a few "let's go with frenemies."

• 1:47:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  So, there's a long list of things anarchists have invented, which can be used for good or evil. The carriage-mounted machine gun. Missiles, apparently. The getaway car. Foosball. Steampunk. Free bike programs. Signal, the messaging app. One thing that you can say was probably invented by someone who called himself an anarchist at the time was the car bomb.

• 1:47:25Robert Evans?

  Ah, well, yeah. Look, I've seen a couple of car bombs. I've even seen one kill people and, uh, not a fan of car bombs.

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:47:35Robert Evans?

  Well, it was a VBIED, which I guess is like, uh, it's in that line of descent, yeah.

• 1:47:40Speaker 04

  I am still, sorry, I had to see anyone die.

• 1:47:44Robert Evans?

  It's okay. I mostly, I mean, they were far enough away that I just kind of saw them turned into smoke.

• 1:47:50Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, no, I'm sure that doesn't have any effects on your psyche.

• 1:47:52Robert Evans?

  No, no, not at all, not at all.

• 1:47:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history was the Wall Street bombing of September 16th, 1920.

• 1:48:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, I have heard of this, yeah.

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  Someone, it is not certain who, used a horse-drawn wagon as the first car bomb. And every time I say "the first" in any show, it's like, you know, I don't know, the first that I know about.

• 1:48:21Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  Uh, there's a whole book about the history of the car bomb called Buddha's Wagon, because we're gonna get to

• 1:48:26Robert Evans?

  Ooh, that's a good name.

• 1:48:27Speaker 04

  How it was probably Mario Buddha.

• 1:48:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  In this car bomb-

• 1:48:30Robert Evans?

  I thought they were talking, I was hoping there was some Buddhist history with car bombs that I hadn't heard, but okay, that makes sense.

• 1:48:36Speaker 04

  No, I mean, maybe, I don't know, but-

• 1:48:38Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:48:40Speaker 04

  In this carriage was 100 pounds of dynamite, 500 pounds of cast iron weights for shrapnel. And they rode the horse up, and then the driver got out and left, and blew up on Wall Street, not in one of the buildings. It killed 40 people and then like injured hundreds of people. And almost everyone it killed were like fucking kids that worked as messengers and like clerks and shit.

• 1:49:04Robert Evans?

  Again, this is like the problem of like, just, this thing you get on Twitter whenever stuff happens where it's like, somebody has attacked this group of people that like leftists broadly dislike. And it's like, I don't know, hey, wait a minute to see if that's who they hit.

• 1:49:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19Robert Evans?

  You know, I'm not talking about, you know, the recent thing, but like, it happens often where it's like, yeah. Turns out like, oh no, no, that's not, that's not who got hurt.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Robert Evans?

  Cause that's, you know, with bombs, very hard to be, it's the same thing, like, it's not just a leftist thing, like, it's mostly not a leftist thing. It's a thing that I grew up watching all of the adults around me celebrate as like bombs got dropped in places that I now know, because I understand more about bombs. And talked to people who were in those places when they were being bombed, were largely killing civilians, because precision bombing is mostly a myth.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:49:55Robert Evans?

  It's just like, people love explosions.

• 1:49:58Speaker 04

  And the guy who had recently just tried to kill Mussolini earlier in the story didn't do it, because it wasn't a good bomb chance.

• 1:50:05Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:50:06Speaker 04

  And-

• 1:50:07Robert Evans?

  Don't make bombs. I shouldn't need to say that. Don't be making bombs. Don't do bombs. Bombs, bombs bad. You will not be the one who figures out how to use bombs ethically.

• 1:50:18Robert Evans?

  No one ever has been.

• 1:50:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And this wasn't some kids who died as collateral damage, but we killed some big shots. This was all collateral damage, no regular damage.

• 1:50:29Robert Evans?

  Cool. Really put the fear of God into those people who didn't get hurt.

• 1:50:35Speaker 04

  Yep. And I would argue that of every major political ideology of the last 200 years, anarchism probably has the least innocent blood on its hands.

• 1:50:44Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. In part because we, we generally don't wind up in power.

• 1:50:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:50:50Robert Evans?

  Which is, you know, I mean, is part of the goal, but.

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. But the Wall Street bombing is a decent chunk of the innocent blood on our hands of the anarchist movement.

• 1:51:01Robert Evans?

  That's a bad one.

• 1:51:02Speaker 04

  The most likely suspect is an Italian anarchist named Mario Buda, who was actually probably with Sacco when they robbed and killed those people in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Mario Buda is like a, a mystery man in history. And there's a lot of like takes on him and he was like kind of almost everywhere that like violence was happening.

• 1:51:23Speaker 04

  Mario Buda went on to almost certainly become a fascist informant in Italy.

• 1:51:29Robert Evans?

  Cool.

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. And almost certainly foil another anarchist attempt on Mussolini's life.

• 1:51:37Robert Evans?

  He is the worst. Yeah, you're right. That is as shitty as you can possibly be as an anarchist militant.

• 1:51:44Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:51:45Robert Evans?

  Honestly, I, I'm mad, I'm, I'm mad, but I am a little impressed. Like if I was making up an anarchist for you to get mad at, I couldn't do better than this.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely. After murdering a bunch of kids and shit in the name of anarchy, he made his way back to Italy, got caught up in the hubbub.

• 1:52:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And stopped someone from killing Mussolini?

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:52:06Robert Evans?

  Jesus.

• 1:52:08Speaker 04

  By 1933, it seems likely that he is cooperating with police and informing on anarchists. And a lot of like, people who are really into anarchist history are skeptical of this because for a while, the only information that anyone had about this was that a communist newspaper accused him of this at the time.

• 1:52:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  And a lot of people, even anarchists, listened and were like, oh, we don't trust this guy anymore. But other people were like, oh, that's the communists playing sectarian politics. And then later you can see historians have done the work of being like, here's where Mario Buda was dropped off the list of dangerous anarchists to keep an eye out for. And like, here's, you know, he's basically like, the fascists took him under their wing. And even if half of what they say about Mario Buddha is true, I don't like him at all. I don't like blowing up kids on Wall Street. I don't like cooperating with fascists. I don't like foiling an attempt on Mussolini's life.

• 1:52:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, again, I, yeah, really, one of my very few lines is, you probably shouldn't, don't go, don't be killing kids. DBKK, that's my little like, what would Jesus do bracelet? In case you ever need to look at that.

• 1:53:09Speaker 04

  Not kill kids.

• 1:53:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, look at a bracelet. Oh, no, you know what? I shouldn't kill kids.

• 1:53:15Robert Evans?

  Also, if you need to look at a bracelet to remind you not to kill kids, I would, maybe, there's a lot of things you probably need to do.

• 1:53:24Speaker 04

  Therapy, yeah. Meanwhile, back to a regular anarchist, one I like, who doesn't become a fascist.

• 1:53:31Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:53:31Speaker 04

  There's a blacksmith named Umberto, I promise you another Umberto, Tommasini. Umberto got involved in politics when he was 13. He joined the 1909 general strike in response to the murder of the Spanish anarchist educator and veteran of the pod, Francisco Ferrar. He went on to fight in World War I. He won a cross for valor. But according to his own take, what happened is he got to the war because he was conscripted, and he just shot into the air, and he was like trying not to kill anyone.

• 1:53:57Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, that's actually, I mean, there's some evidence, although the studies around it have been, to a degree, there's a lot of critiques about them, but like, some evidence that that was more the norm than not with combat soldiers.

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

  And I bet especially when you're talking about like trenches and stuff where you're like...

• 1:54:13Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  Go shoot that dot on the horizon. Whereas like if someone's like running through a trench trying to kill me, I'm like, I'm gonna shoot that man even if we have the same political ideology, if someone's trying to kill me with a...

• 1:54:25Robert Evans?

  I just don't want to get shot.

• 1:54:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. But yeah, no, totally. And he, he spent some time as a POW during the war, and then he returned home to return to work as a blacksmith, and he more formally committed to anarchism alongside his brothers, who, like all, everyone else, they left the Socialist Party in 1921 after the socialists sold out the movement. Again, I don't know as much about that, but that is what Umberto felt and his brothers felt.

• 1:54:52Speaker 04

  Umberto's life could easily be his own episode. He helped get the bombs from one Gino to the other Gino in 1926, then spent six years in prison during the crackdown on, like, after Mussolini came to power, he sent a whole bunch of the anarchists to prison, right?

• 1:55:05Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  During those six years, he met an anarchist in prison named Mario Buda. Then Umberto fled Italy on foot to Yugoslavia, then he went to Paris, where he met his partner Anna and had his son Rene. In 1936, Spain was under attack, and so Umberto left the then-safety of Paris to go to the front lines, teaching anarchists about trench warfare. And then he became an anarchist spec ops guy, and he went off to go mine Francoist ships.

• 1:55:32Robert Evans?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:55:34Robert Evans?

  He's the opposite of the guy who just killed children and saved Mussolini.

• 1:55:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And he shouldn't have been friends with that guy. He was arrested by Stalinists and prevented from attacking the fascists while he was off to go mine these ships. He broke out of Stalinist prison, and then he returned back to the prison he had just broken out of, alongside anarchists from the government to negotiate everyone's release. I think this is the same situation as the last man, the missile inventor man.

• 1:56:03Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:04Speaker 04

  But this might have just happened a bunch of times.

• 1:56:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:07Speaker 04

  Because I read about these in different sources. Then, in 1937, he goes back to France, so he can plot how to kill Mussolini.

• 1:56:15Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:16Speaker 04

  One problem. One of his co-conspirators, a man who he has absolute trust for, is Mario Buda, whom he had met in prison.

• 1:56:24Robert Evans?

  Oh.

• 1:56:25Speaker 04

  Mario leaks the plan to the Italian police, who foiled it. After the war, Mario Buda went back to the anarchist movement. Hooray!

• 1:56:34Robert Evans?

  Great. He sounds trustworthy. I'm sure he's really worked on things.

• 1:56:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, don't want to cancel him just for saving Mussolini's life and murdering children.

• 1:56:49Speaker 04

  I can't find much about this particular assassination attempt that he foiled. Mostly, I found a lot of ins and outs about the informant. But to follow Umberto, he, like so many other anarchists, wound up in a non-Nazi concentration camp in France, then he was turned over to the Italian police, where he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Finally, he's freed, he returns to his wife and his son, and his work as a blacksmith, and to anarchist organizing. When the spirit of 68 swings through, he starts organizing again. He's like about 70 years old, and he's like organizing with a bunch of 20-year-old kids, right? Because it's 1968.

• 1:57:25Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, that's who there's gonna be to organize with.

• 1:57:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's cool as shit. He kept publishing shit that would send him back to jail. I think he was sent back to jail like multiple times, just for continuing to publish anarchist literature. And then he died in 1980. He wrote an autobiography, but I don't believe it's been translated. And there's a documentary about him called An Anarchist's Life from 2013 that I haven't seen yet, that I want to see. And he was real cool. But I don't know what he did to try and kill Mussolini. I just know he made the wrong friend.

• 1:57:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, we all do sometimes. For example, I mean, there was one summer that Benita Mussolini and I were inseparable. I mean, we would spend just hours on the beach, telling each other's secrets, having picnics, you know? There was that one wine-drenched night, and then I found out he'd been the dictator of Italy this whole time. I had no idea, Margaret. I had no idea.

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  I know. I mean, what's funny is that, pre-him becoming Mussolini, that is the story that a lot of people tell.

• 1:58:26Robert Evans?

  A lot of people do have that story.

• 1:58:27Speaker 04

  Like, the woman, Lita, who was probably his lover, who was an anarchist, who was like, later, she was like, "I misjudged his character." You know?

• 1:58:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  "Whomst amongst us hasn't been friends with the inventor of fascism?"

• 1:58:42Robert Evans?

  Well, Coen, I mean, we've got, there was another Italian who might deserve that title a little more, but we talked about him on Behind the Bastards.

• 1:58:51Speaker 04

  Wait, which one?

• 1:58:53Robert Evans?

  Oh, the guy who wore a banana hammock? Uh, one sec.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  Wait, what? Did he invent the banana hammock?

• 1:58:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, but he, uh, one sec. I don't remember this person's name either.

• 1:59:04Speaker 04

  We definitely talked about it, though.

• 1:59:05Robert Evans?

  Gabriel de Nunezio.

• 1:59:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:59:08Robert Evans?

  Gabriel de Nunezio, uh, who was a big influence on Mussolini and was like, is often credited as the inventor of fascism. Um, he never called himself a fascist. He's like partially, right? There's not just one guy.

• 1:59:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:59:23Robert Evans?

  But he is earlier in the chain of the development of fascism as a concept than Mussolini, uh, and an influence on Benito. Yeah.

• 1:59:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:59:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Gabriel de Nunezio, you can listen to our two parter on him. Very much worth it. He is the guy who, when Fume is an independent city, he's a guy who marches into Fume and takes it over as like a pro, along with a bunch of anar- there were anarchists and communists and fascists all kind of together because they were all very much anti just all of the things that are going on right now. But those ideologies hadn't really hardened into the, in the concrete way they would a couple of years later. Fascinating time. Kind of like how a lot of our most prominent right wing fa- a lot of our most prominent fascist media ideologues today were part of Occupy?

• 2:00:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. God, actually, the Occupy versus Fume thing is actually, makes a lot of really specific sense. That's the thing that's like, it's so hard to talk about is that in a certain way fascism is the red brown alliance because it is taking ideas from leftism and, but applying them to right wing ideology.

• 2:00:29Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:00:30Speaker 04

  Well, two more people at least tried to kill Mussolini. One of them, don't know much about, isn't even on the list of people who tried to kill Mussolini Wikipedia. His name is Domenico Bavone, and he was a Republican. He's the Republican on our list. He tried to build bombs to kill Mussolini, but he didn't go to the bomb making workshop for the punk show flyer told him about in Brussels.

• 2:00:56Robert Evans?

  That's a shame.

• 2:00:56Speaker 04

  So he failed at making the bombs properly and he blew up his own house on September 5th, 1931, killing his own mother.

• 2:01:03Robert Evans?

  Well.

• 2:01:04Speaker 05

  Bad job, bro.

• 2:01:05Robert Evans?

  That's about as, that's about as bad. I mean, and again, don't build bombs. There are so many, by far the most normal story in political radical tries to make a bomb is political radical kills themselves, their friends or their family.

• 2:01:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Don't make bombs.

• 2:01:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're very indiscriminate. And, uh, under interrogation, he admitted he was trying to kill Mussolini. And he was shot in the back by a firing squad.

• 2:01:33Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:34Speaker 04

  And then there is Angelo Pellegrino Sabardietto.

• 2:01:39Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:40Speaker 04

  Angelo was born in 1907 in Mel, Italy, and he was the fifth of 11 children, which means I do not need to tell you he was from a Catholic family, but he was. His family was poor as hell. Uh, the article I read specifically indicated they were poor as hell because they had 11 children. But, you know, whatever. You do you. People can make their own decisions about how many kids to have. They fled poverty to France, then Luxembourg, then Belgium. Angelo was a miner and a machine hand. He became an anarchist as a teenager, talking to other immigrant workers who were mostly political refugees. Soon enough, he was on lists of dangerous extremists and draft dodgers and shit. And he was inspired by Mikel Oshiru, and he met almost the exact same fate.

• 2:02:25Speaker 04

  In 1932, he went to Rome to kill Mussolini. But like Mikel before him, he couldn't find a moment when he could bomb Mussolini without hurting anyone else. He spent months trying. Should've just bought a gun. That man should've bought a gun. Uh, I mean, whatever.

• 2:02:42Robert Evans?

  I don't know how hard it was to buy guns in Mussolini's Italy.

• 2:02:45Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 2:02:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:47Speaker 04

  But, you know, he spent months trying and he was on the verge of giving up when, like Mikel, he was arrested seemingly by happenstance on a train station. Just like some cops were like, eh, you're suspicious, we're gonna search you. Which is, you know, fascism. Also, the same thing happens in New York City subways, but, you know, whatever.

• 2:03:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:08Speaker 04

  When he was searched, he had a Swiss passport, a pistol. Oh, he had a fucking gun.

• 2:03:13Robert Evans?

  Oh, well, okay. I guess not that hard.

• 2:03:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Robert Evans?

  Question answered.

• 2:03:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. And two bombs. And he was tortured, and under torture, he said he was there to avenge Michaeli Shiro. He'd written a letter previously that year that said, quote, "I have no choice. To be free, tyranny must be beaten. To build tomorrow a new order in which all can enjoy the fruits of their labor and freely express their thoughts, we must destroy today all the injustices which render this impossible." His trial was a show trial. It was two days long. Journalists decried him as surly and sinister, and would like literally make stuff up about how he looked. They were like, "He had a low forehead," you know, um, which he didn't, but even if he did, fuck you, you know?

• 2:04:01Speaker 04

  His lawyer asked him to write Mussolini for clemency. He refused. He shouted "long live anarchy" when he was shot in the back. After he was killed, the fascist government decided to hide forever his burial site. No one knows where his body is.

• 2:04:16Speaker 04

  A biographer for Mussolini said that he would have pardoned the anarchists if they had asked, because he lauded their courage. I mean, considering a lot of his fucking people were former anarchists.

• 2:04:27Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 2:04:27Speaker 04

  I don't know. Maybe he would have, but fuck that. I mean, whatever. I wouldn't be mad if anyone was like, "Oh, please don't kill me, Mr. Mussolini," whatever. I wouldn't be like, "You weakling." Gives a shit.

• 2:04:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Mussolini, I hardly know ye.

• 2:04:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Robert Evans?

  Did I already do that joke? It just occurred to me.

• 2:04:48Speaker 04

  So, yeah, originally, I was gonna talk about the partisans who finally did him in, but I think we've covered a lot of trying to kill Mussolini. There are too many cool people I didn't want to skim past. You got a socialist, a Catholic, a Republican, and at least five anarchists who tried to do him in. But it took a whole ass war. We got him in the end, though.

• 2:05:05Robert Evans?

  And you know what, folks? What I'll say right now is, you can still try to take a shot at Mussolini, and he's a lot easier to hit now. I assume he's buried somewhere.

• 2:05:15Speaker 04

  Probably. I feel like-

• 2:05:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Go dig him up.

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, and take a shot.

• 2:05:20Robert Evans?

  Take a shot.

• 2:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22Robert Evans?

  Harder to miss that way.

• 2:05:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Gender-neutral shooting range. That's what they say.

• 2:05:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  His gravesite.

• 2:05:27Robert Evans?

  That's right. Take a shot with, you know, it could just be with the tool that you have on hand, so to speak. That was a penis joke.

• 2:05:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:38Speaker 05

  We know.

• 2:05:38Speaker 04

  It could have been a pee joke, because you can have a tool on hand without a penis.

• 2:05:42Robert Evans?

  You're right. You could use, you can use a sheezy, for example, you know, there's all sorts of great, or just you cut the bottom of a water bottle out and then like, cut the top to widen it, and you kind of jam it in there. It sort of works.

• 2:05:55Speaker 04

  And I can't believe that's the note we're ending on, but that's where we're at, everyone. Go kill Mussolini, but only Mussolini. We're talking about the past.

• 2:06:04Robert Evans?

  Yes, only in the past.

• 2:06:06Speaker 04

  And if you want to know more about the knock-on effects of various types of violence, listen to this entire show's history, because it is full of knock-on effects, many of which are negative.

• 2:06:16Robert Evans?

  And in terms of things I will continue to say for the modern era, don't make bombs. Don't make bombs.

• 2:06:27Speaker 05

  Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

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• 2:08:19Speaker 01

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